We live, simultaneously, in two different worlds. Ultimately, we live in the World of Nature, a world that we did not create and the world upon which all life depends. Most immediately, we inhabit a "human world" that we create ourselves. Because our human world is the result of our own choices and actions, we can say, quite properly, that we live, most immediately, in a “political world.” In this blog, I hope to explore the interaction of these two worlds that we call home.

About Me

Gary A. Patton

I was an elected official in Santa Cruz County, California for twenty years, from 1975 to 1995. Now, I am an environmental attorney, practicing law in Santa Cruz County. If you would like to contact me, send me an email at gapatton@mac.com.

Although self-identified as a "non-believer" and an "atheist," Ehrenreich's recent book describes her personal encounter with the transcendent:

The world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with the ‘All,’ as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.

I have personally had an experience quite similar to the one that Ehrenreich describes above. That experience occurred when I, like Ehrenreich, was about nineteen or twenty years old.

As I wrote quite recently, there is, I think, a kind of World of the Spirit that provides a "third dimension" to the reality (or realities) we inhabit. Anyone who thinks that they could define and describe it would be foolish in the extreme.

4 comments:

While this is a wonderful thought that warms the cockles of the mind, there is no evidence for a world of the spirit.

This doesn't mean that humans don't have spiritual experiences. I have had one myself, when I was 32 or thereabouts. It was a very real internal experience, a product of nonlinear processes within the physical matter of my brain. An experience many others relate, in different ways and with different interpretations. Which tells us that such an experience is a normal process of brain biochemistry and electrodynamics.

There are many dimensions of reality, eleven at last count. But the spirit is not one of them. What we interpret as the spirit is well accounted for in our normal four dimensions of spacetime.